Dachau Trials

US vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al

American Military Tribunal
proceedings were held in this building at Dachau

The first "Dachau Trial," which
began on November 15, 1945, is sometimes called "the trial
of Martin Gottfried Weiss and 39 others," but it was officially
known as US vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al. The proceedings
took place in a courtroom set up in one of the buildings inside
the former Dachau camp complex, as shown in the photo above.

The "Dachau trials" were actually
the proceedings of an American Military Tribunal, not trials
in the ordinary sense. The accused were considered to be guilty
as charged, and the burden of proof was on them, not on the prosecution.

The attorneys on both sides were American
military officers, as were the members of the panel which acted
as the judge and jury. The chief prosecutor was Lt. Col. William
Denson. He was assisted by Captain Philip Heller, Captain William
D. Lines, and Captain Richard G. McCuskey.

Lt. Paul Guth was the chief interrogator
who was in charge of getting signed confessions from the accused
before the proceedings began. Lt. Guth was a Jew who had emigrated
to the United States from Vienna, Austria in 1941.

Capt. John Barnett
identifies US Army photos of Dachau

Chief prosecutor Lt.
Col. William Denson is the man on the right

The defense team was led by Lt. Col.
Douglas Bates. The other team members were Major Maurice McKeown,
Captain John May, and Captain Dalwin Niles. The accused were
allowed to have a German lawyer represent them and they chose
Baron Hans Karl von Posern, a former inmate in the Mauthausen
concentration camp who was incarcerated at Dachau, awaiting trial
himself. Von Posern proved to be such a good lawyer that he was
given a job on the prosecution team during the proceedings against
the Mauthausen concentration camp staff.

The tribunal which sat in judgment of
the accused consisted of 8 senior officers: Brig. Gen. John Lenz,
who was the President of the Court, and Col. Laird Richards,
Col. Wendell Blanchard, Col. George E. Brunner, Col. G. R. Scithers,
Col. Lester Abele, Col. Peter O. Ward, and Col. John R. Jeter.

On November 2, 1945 and November 4, 1945
charges against the following 42 men, who were the accused in
the proceedings, entitled US vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al,
were read in the courtroom at Dachau in German and in English:

Although Hans Aumeier and Hans Bayer
were included in the charges read on November 2nd, they were
not among the accused when the proceedings began, so they were
not assigned a number. SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Aumeier
was tried by a Polish court in Krakow for war crimes committed
when he was an assistant to Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz.
He was convicted and hanged on January 28, 1948. Bayer was prosecuted
in a subsidiary proceeding at a later time; he was convicted
and sentenced to death by hanging, but his sentence was commuted
to 15 years in prison.

The charges
against Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al were brought by The
General Military Court, appointed by Par. 3, Special Order 304,
Headquarters Third United States Army and Eastern Military District,
dated 2 November 1945, to be held at Dachau, Germany, on, or
about, November 15, 1945. Two charges of Violation of the Laws
and Usages of War were brought against the defendants.

The first charge alleged that the Dachau
accused "acting in pursuance of a common design to
commit the acts hereinafter alleged, and as members of the staff
of Dachau Concentration Camp and camps subsidiary thereto, did,
at, or in the vicinity of DACHAU and LANDSBERG, Germany, between
about 1 January 1942 and about 29 April 1945, willfully, deliberately
and wrongfully encourage, aid, abet and participate in the subjection
of civilian nationals of nations then at war with the then German
Reich to cruelties and mistreatment, including killings, beatings,
tortures, starvation, abuses and indignities, the exact names
and numbers of such civilian nationals being unknown but aggregating
many thousands who were then and there in the custody of the
German Reich in exercise of belligerent control."

The second charge was worded exactly
the same as the first, except that it specified "members
of the armed forces," instead of civilians. Like the first
charge, no names of victims or specific acts against members
of the armed forces were listed.

Note that the charges included killings,
beatings, tortures, starvation, abuses and indignities, but there
was no specific charge of gassing, although a film of the Dachau
gas chamber was shown on November 29, 1945 at the Nuremberg International
Military Tribunal, two weeks after the Dachau proceedings began.
It was not known whether any victims who might have been killed
in the Dachau gas chamber were from Allied countries, so this
charge was not included.

Crimes against German citizens, and others
who were not civilians or military personnel in an Allied country,
were not included; it was left up to the German courts to bring
charges against the concentration camp staff members for crimes
against victims from non-Allied countries. The charges included
only Violations of the Laws and Usages of War and not Crimes
against Humanity.

In 1963, charges of gassing prisoners
were brought by a German court in Frankfurt against 22 former
staff members of the Auschwitz death camp, but the staff members
at Dachau never had to answer to a German court for gassing prisoners
at Dachau. In fact, the head of the Institute for Contemporary
History, Martin Brozat, had declared in 1960 that there was no
gas chamber at Dachau.

The charges against Martin Gottfried
Weiss, and the 39 other members of the Dachau staff, were based
on the theory that all of them had participated in a "common
design" to run the concentration camp in a manner which
had caused the prisoners great suffering, severe injury or death.
The period of time covered by the charges was from January 1,
1942 until April 29, 1945. Although the camp had been in operation
since March 22, 1933, this was roughly the period of time that
the Dachau camp had been in existence while America was at war
with Germany.

The basis for the prosecution of staff
members of the Nazi concentration camps was that some of the
inmates had been captured enemy soldiers who were Prisoners of
War and consequently they should have been treated according
to the rules of the Geneva Convention, including the Russian
POWs, although the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention
and had not followed it during the war. Other inmates in the
Nazi camps were political prisoners, partisans, resistance fighters
or insurgents from German-occupied countries; they were considered
by the American prosecutors to be comparable to Prisoners of
War although the 1929 Geneva Convention did not give insurgents
the same rights as POWs. In fact, the resistance fighters in
German-occupied countries had violated the rules of the 1929
Geneva Convention themselves by continuing to fight after their
countries had surrendered.

Of the 40 men who were prosecuted in
the main Dachau case, all had held some position of authority
in the concentration camp, although not all of them had served
at the same time and they did not necessarily know each other.
Nine of the men had at one time been camp commandants or deputy
camp commandants; one was an adjutant and three were on the administrative
staff of the commandant. Five of the accused were medical officers
and two were medical orderlies. Three were guards and one was
an officer in charge of a battalion of guards. Four were Kapos,
or prisoners who were in charge of other inmates, and one was
the supply officer. Four of the accused were block leaders who
were SS men in charge of a barrack, as well as being in charge
of work parties.

Johann Kick, one of the accused, was
in charge of the political department at Dachau. Otto Schultz
was a carpenter in the Dachau camp. Engelbert Niedermeyer had
worked in the crematorium. Vinzenz Schoettl had previously worked
at the Auschwitz III-Monowitz camp and Otto Moll was a former
staff member at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Moll was put on trial
at Dachau because he had preventd prisoners from escaping as
he led an evacuation march from the Kaufering II sub-camp to
the Dachau camp. Albin Gretsch and Johann Schoepp were guards
who had prevented prisoners from escaping from transports to
Dachau.

These 40 were not selected, out of the
thousands of SS men who had worked at the camp, because their
crimes were the most heinous. Rather, they were selected as a
representative group because included among them were staff members
from every category of personnel in the concentration camp. The
purpose was to show that anyone connected with a Nazi concentration
camp was guilty of a crime, regardless of his personal behavior.

Witnesses for the prosecution were former
prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp who were given room
and board and a payment of 1,000 Deutschmarks for their testimony,
according to Joshua M. Greene, in his book ""Justice
at Dachau." They were housed in the SS buildings on the
former Avenue of the SS, which was named Tennessee Road by the
Americans who were working on the trials. The photograph below
shows one of these buildings which is still standing.

Building where prosecution
witnesses were housed

There were seats for 300 spectators in
the courtroom at Dachau and for each day of the trial, there
were 300 tickets issued to German civilians in the nearby towns.

The following quote is from "Witness
to Barbarism," written by Horace R. Hansen, one of the prosecutors
at Dachau:

For each day of the trial, we issue
300 tickets to civilians in different towns near Dachau. American
personnel trucks will pick them up. They will receive a warm
lunch and be returned to their homes about 5:30 P.M. Signs to
this effect are posted in each town.

The tickets go quickly. The German
civilians who attend the trial see each prisoner point out his
torturer, according to a defendant number (1 to 40) hung on his
chest. This is the first time that most of the spectators hear
the truth. American soldiers who dress as locals and speak in
the local dialect give us before-and-after reactions of the civilians.
Before distributing tickets for each town, two soldiers listen
to groups of civilians, who usually say, in effect: "Those
Americans on the radio are lying about what went on in the Dachau
camp." The two then return to the town to listen again,
after the civilians have heard some of the testimony. This time
they say, "It was terrible what went on in that camp."

From the accumulation of evidence,
we know that German civilians living near main camps or subcamps
occasionally saw the gaunt, ill-clad prisoners being marched
along roads toward nearby factories. At times, a civilian close
to a main camp caught the stench from a tall chimney and perhaps
deduced cremation. The civilians certainly knew the prisoners
were foreigners working against their will. But the only information
the civilians received from the controlled media was that the
workers were common criminals or enemies of the Reich.